Kalmar Nyckel Foundation to launch '375 Years on The Delaware: New Sweden Past and Present'

The Kalmar Nyckel Foundation announces the second in its lecture series for 2013, entitled “375 Years on The Delaware: New Sweden Past and Present” on Sunday at the Chase Center on the Riverfront in Wilmington.

The Kalmar Nyckel Foundation announces the second in its lecture series for 2013, entitled "375 Years on The Delaware: New Sweden Past and Present" on Sunday at the Chase Center on the Riverfront in Wilmington.

The Foundation is presenting three fascinating lectures, each one highlighting a different element from Sweden's role in colonizing the Delaware Valley, which began in 1638. The lecture series, its fifth annual, supports the Foundation's mission to preserve and promote Delaware's cultural and maritime heritage for the education and enrichment of all.

Here's the detail on lecture number two:

LECTURE 2: "Delaware's First Corporate Takeover: The Dutch and the Swedes in a

17th-Century Battle for Business"

• By Dr. Charles Gehring, Historian and Translator of Dutch Archives, Director of the New Netherland Research Center, New Netherland Institute, Albany, N.Y.

Renowned scholar, historian, and translator of the Dutch Archives housed in the New York State Library in Albany, N.Y., Dr. Charles Gehring will present a lecture about Delaware's first corporate conflict, a "battle for business" between what amounted to two multinational corporate conglomerates, one under Swedish sovereignty, the other Dutch.

Capitalism came in the first European ships, and Delaware was on the cutting edge of the modern world, a world that we've inherited for better and worse.

It seems fitting that Delaware – known today as the corporate capital of American and the registered home to over 60 percent of the world's Fortune 500 companies – should have been founded by two competing corporate entities, the Dutch West India Company and the New Sweden Company. Two of the Fortune 500 Companies of their day, they were joint stock enterprises chartered explicitly to engage in commerce across the Atlantic and to make money.

And like "hedges funds" and other vehicles for financial investment, they were high-risk ventures that could bring even higher rewards – or utter ruin. Delaware in the first half of the 17th century was still something of a "new frontier," a fertile land rich with possibilities, an as yet "undefined" place for entrepreneurs to stake their claims, a gateway to the American interior and to the future.

Here to tell us about this very modern story is Dr. Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherland Research Center. Gehring is the translator extraordinaire of the Dutch Archives and has been working away tirelessly since 1974 on the collection of some 12,000 pages of documents.

For over 38 years now, scholars and students have looked to Dr. Gehring when investigating the early history of New York and the larger Dutch colony of New Netherland. In 2004, Gehring and his work received international acclaim thanks to the New York Times bestselling book by Russell Shorto, entitled "The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America," credit that was long overdue and richly deserved.

Page 2 of 2 - A long-time supporter of the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation and present for the launch of the ship in 1997, Gehring has been a wise and generous friend. We are honored to be able to present Gehring to a greater Delaware Valley audience during this 375th anniversary year.